My fiancé (boyfriend of 6 years) has recently told me that he needed time for himself and his family. He told me that he needed this time to find his old self. I told him that I will wait and that I will respect his decision. I was thinking that he really needed this time to spend with his family since his dad is very ill (cancer patient). But a month has passed by already and I haven’t heard anything from him. He even changed all his profiles and removed all traces of pictures/videos when we’re still together.

I was in denial at first and was still hoping that this is really just a time-off because that was our last conversation. That I will wait. Knowing that the person I’m supposed to spend the rest of my life with has left me hanging like I never even mattered to him is extremely painful. He was a coward for not telling me the truth.

Now, even though he has obviously moved on already, I feel like I’m still hanging in the air. Can closure, as they say, help me move on with my life? Or will trying to talk to him just inflict further pain?

Fiancée Left Behind

Dear Fiancée Left Behind,

For the record, it’s easier to cut someone off today but it’s no easier to move on from them. Big difference. You said your fiancé has “obviously” moved on already. That’s not obvious to me. Sure, he has sat down somewhere and opened up his Facebook. He has pushed delete, delete, delete. But that’s Facebook. I hate to say it but social media is where the cowards go to do their dirty work. It’s also where the pained carry out rash and poor decisions. Have you called him and said this hurts me? Have you asked him what his intention is, whether he’s deleting photographs of the two of you to “help” him or is it to signal some harsh message to you?

Men often tell me that women can’t handle the truth. That’s why they say I’ll see you Saturday and never call. That’s why they disappear. That’s why they push delete. That’s why they don’t give women full answers. You know what I tell these men? I tell them we can handle the truth, it’s you who can’t handle telling the truth. I’m yet to meet a man who hasn’t softened and said, oh, right. Men don’t challenge me on this. If they ever do, I’ll look them dead on and say teach us then. Teach women to handle the truth.

In the meantime, let me talk some truth to you. It’s true that men (most of them) don’t want to deal with confrontation. They don’t want to be dragged back into something that no longer arrests their heart. They don’t want to come face to face with a woman who is hurting. They don’t want to feel responsible for falling short of “the dream.” They certainly don’t want a woman to be their mirror. And a woman who doesn’t understand usually is that mirror. Because, often, men at their worst, at their weakest, are men who aren’t understanding much either. This is why they flee questioning. This is why they say they need time to figure “it” out. Time to figure themselves out.

Men and women flee for two reasons and two reasons only. Because we think we can outrun the questions or because we think we can chase the answers down. But understanding can’t be chased. It can be avoided, no doubt, but it can’t ever be rushed. Understanding is a gift that becomes us, and the gift of perspective often won’t happen in a month. Typically it takes more life than that. For this reason, I’d recommend calling off the search party. It’s been one month, don’t search for answers yet.

I think your fiancé has a lot on his mind. And the reality is, he’s probably focusing on his father more than you. At least, that’s why he’s left you and gone to him, right? There’s probably sadness inside of him and fear and pain and worry and regret and anger and blame. Maybe even self-blame. Who knows, maybe he wishes he’d given more of his attention to his father. (I’m in contact with my father daily but eventually even I will wish I had spent more time knowing him, loving him, and just being.) For the last six years, you’ve had your fiancé’s attention. That’s not your fault, that’s love, that’s partnership, that’s heat and youth and a bubble called romance. But now he probably feels like real life is calling him and he’s got to get there fast.

A lot of things probably don’t make sense right now. Focusing on a future with you probably doesn’t make sense right now. Right now he’s probably focusing on one more day with his father. He’s probably focusing on what one more day could mean to him. He’s probably filled up with fear and love and not a whole lot of reasons. If you focus too much on the two of you, you might push him away forever.

Despite his actions, I don’t recommend pushing him away. That won’t make you stronger or happier. I’m also not recommending you marry him. I don’t know. I don’t know enough. Even if I did, you know your love better than anyone ever will. Only you can feel your way forward. I’m just here to shine a light on what that may look like and how you might move toward it.

So, here we go. Pushing him away isn’t the way out, it also isn’t the way through, acceptance is. Understanding is. Whether he comes back to you or not, you are a part of this equation and the perspective you develop from this day forward will be the determining factor for whether you can let him into your heart again or not. But listen, there’s a reason why those whose trust has been betrayed usually can’t get beyond it. There’s a reason why even though two people come back together, they ultimately end up falling back apart. Because they return with the same perspective they had when they left or were left. Because if either one of you doesn’t arrive with new understanding, the relationship will not progress. And because you can’t decide whether he ever shows up with any new understanding or not, the only “whys” you should be focusing on are the ones that reside within you.

For example, why might you have needed a break from your fiancé? What’s the best thing you could do with this time apart? While he’s caring for his father, what is calling on you to care for it? Who can you reconnect with? Where have you fallen out of touch with yourself? Who were you six years ago, right before you met your fiancé? Is there any part of you or your life that you miss? How can you revisit those aspects of yourself? If his leaving you were actually a blessing in disguise, what blessing would that be? Why do you think you’ve fallen in love with a man who could switch off so easily? What are the first emotions you try to separate yourself from?

While these questions might be uncomfortable, to recover yourself you must answer them and then embrace those answers. Embracing your own truth will make it easier to embrace his. And, whether he belongs in your future or not, accepting what you had and what you now have is imperative to loving without any bitterness in your heart. This is where closure comes into play. Closure, mind you, is a tricky little dance.

Often when someone comes to me and talks about their desire for closure, what they really want is one of three things: (1) to no longer feel anything toward their ex; (2) to know why their ex did x, y, and z so they no longer doubt themselves; and (3) hope for reconciliation.

From this, I’ve discovered that the want for closure is more often the desire for an opening. I feel like you want an opening. You want a chance. Since there’s no knowing whether he will give you that chance, it only makes sense to focus on your ability to give him a chance. Because, believe it or not, it will come down to this.

For you to give him a chance, you will have to accept what he did. You will have to accept that he gave you a ring and left you in the dark. That he did not tell you the truth. That he deleted your photographs. Your moments. That he acted like you didn’t exist. You will have to accept that he was the catalyst for so much pain. To be clear, you can accept this. I’ve accepted this before. And I’ve gone through something similar to you. Only, it wasn’t a month and it wasn’t a fiancé. It was a guy who talked a big talk about marrying me and disappeared because he was sick but then came back and then disappeared after my grandfather died. He disappeared for a year.

By the way, he didn’t just show back up either. It took my calling and my initiation and my bravery. It took me not pretending that I didn’t still think of him, that I didn’t still care. More than anything, it took me deciding that I didn’t want to be controlled by another person’s cowardice and my own pride. To this day, I’m happy I picked up that phone. I’m proud of myself. I’m still proud of me. I think you just want to be proud of how you handle this, too. The beauty is you don’t need him to come along and do anything for you to feel proud of yourself. You just need your own brave actions.

So, how did I make my big, brave move? I spent months answering my own questions, my own whys. I gave up the need to figurehimout. I never asked myself why this happened to me. I was only ever curious about discovering why it happened for me. What bullet did I dodge? Again, the answer wasn’t him. (Though, how very little effort it takes to think so.) The answer was my own pattern of continual co-dependency. My answer was another long distance relationship that I had sworn would never happen again. You see, before he even came into the picture, I knew I had work to do. The silver lining is, if he hadn’t disappeared, I may have never given myself the chance to make myself a priority.

But because he did, for the first time, I did what I had to do. I put my passion into me, myself, then men. And this switcheroo made all the difference. This reprioritization is why a year later, I was the one who was brave enough to call, who cared enough to call. I was the one with humility, curiosity, and compassion. (That’s what it’ll take, FYI, to genuinely show up for a man who has given up on you before.) And you know what he’s told me a few times since then? That when he saw me calling, he realized that I was a better person than him.

This admission was a gift because I wasn’t expecting it. And I wasn’t expecting it because I didn’t need it. I didn’t need him to feel like I was better than him. (Though of course that was nice.) I needed myself to know whether I was braver. Braver than I had been a year ago. Braver, not in spite of his leaving, but thanks to it.

When my friends found out that I reconnected with him, they thought I went to him for closure. They thought I went to him for answers. Explanations. Apologies. They thought I met up with him so I’d be able to finally let him go. I wasn’t there for any of that. I didn’t ask questions because I didn’t need his answers. I already had my own. I wasn’t there to hear him say sorry because, honestly, what’s a sorry gonna do? I was there because something inside me told me to go. And within the last year, I’d made a practice out of listening to myself, out of no longer betraying my intuition. I was there because I wanted to show up. I wanted to be the person who can show up. I wanted him to see that there were better ways to come into someone’s life and to go.

Girl, I achieved all of that and more. And what friends imagined would be an angry night was actually a magical one. It was magical because for the first time in my life, I felt like the strongest one in the room.

Your fiancé can be a catalyst for your strength as much as he’s been a catalyst for your pain. Use him for that. Use what he’s done to develop yourself, to prioritize yourself, to become the bravest heart in the room.

Maybe one day he will see you calling and he will have to admit to himself how special you are, how strong. And maybe this, maybe you, will inspire him to do better.

Dear Chelsea,

I’m an 18 year old girl and I just went through my first heartbreak, with my first love and my first relationship. Needless to say, my heart is shattered (three months after the breakup). Pathetically enough, I have hope and want him back more than I can explain. How do I win my ex back?

My boyfriend of two years broke up with me my first week of college. Our relationship was very strong and passionate, and I lost my virginity to him this past July. The breakup blindsided me, and at first I believed it was because I was at college and he was still in high school. He broke up with me over a text. I went home for the weekend to talk to him about it and we got back together and had sex that weekend. When I got back to school, things felt very normal. Three days after we got back together he broke up with me again over text.

After he broke up with me, he constantly called me crying saying he missed me. He began texting me, started liking all my Instagram pictures, and asking my friends about me. When he reached out to me I didn’t ignore him, until I found out he was already with another girl while he was still trying to talk to me. That’s when I cut contact.

We haven’t talked in about two months, he deleted all his pictures on Instagram, and I unfollowed him and all his friends on social media. On Facebook it still says we are in a relationship. He didn’t change that.

His mom constantly reached out to me until my mom called her out and said she was making the process of moving on a lot harder. We haven’t spoken in about a month.

Now this is the strange part… yesterday his sister Snapchatted me, his mom commented “miss you” on my Facebook album, his best friend (whom I never speak to) tried to FaceTime me, and then he texted me. All in the same day.

He sent me a photo of myself and his little brother and said he happened to come across it on his phone and thought I might want it. Now, we have an iCloud photo album that is shared on both of our phones that have every picture we have ever taken, whether we are in it or not. He knew that photo was on our album, which is why I was so confused. I asked him if I should delete our iCloud album and he said “no please don’t, it’s okay.” I didn’t reply. He also told me to never throw away anything from our relationship and to keep everything.

I don’t understand why all those people connected to him, including him personally, reached out to me that day. Now might I add, he is a pathological liar so it’s difficult to make sense of the things he says. While we were dating, there was an incident where he told my family and myself an intricate tale about how his real name is Xavier (a name not even close to his real one). He said he was given the name of a child his mother miscarried. Come to find out, that was a total lie. I talked to his mother about it and she showed me his birth certificate. The strangest thing though is she didn’t even seem phased about the way her son lied. Now that’s just one example of the way he lied. I could go on for days.

On the other hand, there is this girl that he was seeing behind my back the summer before college. I think this is the reason we broke up, so he could explore his feelings for her. This girl also has sex with anything that walks and that was what she was known for in high school. He is more of a passionate person, so it made no sense that he would run to a person like that after being with me. I focused on his happiness more so than I did mine, which is why I’m feeling so low about myself lately. He seems to either be enjoying the attention or striving to be in a relationship with her, I really cannot tell.

I just want to know, while he seems to be with another girl, is there any chance for us? Maybe you can make sense of the situation better than I can, because my mind is in a million different places and I don’t know if I should give up hope. Does he miss me? Is that why he texted me? What was the purpose of him reaching out? I love him with all of my heart and we were so perfect for one another. While now I think he broke up with me to explore relationships with other people, I still love him and want to be with him. Is there any hope left?

Sincerely,

First Time Lover

Dear First Time Lover,

It took me until I was 28, that’s ten years from where you are today, to really see what was so good about me at 18. So respectable. I can picture where I was exactly when I had this sobering confrontation with myself. It was 4am. I was in bed—on top of the sheets, not under them—doing what comes easiest to me: being an absolute insomniac.

Some days the consequences of this are torturous but that night is an example of why I stay up just waiting, just willing myself into nights like those. Confrontations like those.

That night it struck me that the difference between my relationships at 28 and 18 was that at 18 I was stronger. I didn’t fool myself and I didn’t let a single man fool me. If he raised his voice, I was gone. It wasn’t a matter of when, it was a matter of now. If I had some sixth sense that he was lying, I sat him down until he looked me in the eyes with truth. If he looked away, I left.

I didn’t stay because a year of my life had already been invested in him, even if it had. I treated men like I treated the city I was living in, like the college I was attending and the education I was receiving there. If it didn’t light me up, I moved on. If I wasn’t growing, I dreamed bigger and chose what would be hard.

New cities were hard.

Beginnings were hard.

Singleness can be hard.

But my gut feeling always was that what’s hard, would be good for me. It would always be better.

Even if I couldn’t feel it right away, hard would always be better than easy.

Better than convenient.

Better than lackluster.

Better than bored.

Better than betrayal.

Always better than me taking refuge in my own trepidation.

Because the moment you start taking refuge there is the very moment you begin training yourself to stay, to make not enough alright, to see the trap as desirable, normal or, worst of all, inevitable—when it doesn’t need to be.

How does this begin?

How does a mindset of smallness hijack the impact we have over our lives?

Well, it starts with staying in something that’s half-assed just because. Just because in surface conversation it sounds magical that your first boyfriend was the man who could give you forever. It sounds magical that you never had to date around.

A life of smallness, a love of smallness, a smaller you starts this way.

It starts with the cycle of recommitting yourself to someone who has let you down. Repeatedly. It starts with allowing the letdown to be alright. It starts with you normalizing it.

Smallness becomes us because we make allowances for people. We create excuses for them. We reason away their lies and wrap our arms tight around their squirmy little chest until we can’t make out a liar’s heartbeat from our own.

Because when you lie to yourself once, you create an opening to lie to yourself forever.

I’m warning you, that opening can become, very quickly, a hard wound to pack.

Do you know how many of us lie about the quality of our love?

Do you know how many of us think our way into love more than we feel our way in?

At 28, I knew for sure that I had spent the last decade putting my hours into becoming a pro at that, so many hours lying to myself about my own feelings and drawing relationships out and forcing happiness into my love. Heck, at 28, I looked back and saw that for so much of my twenties I was just forcing love in general. I was always forcing myself to be in love but I wasn’t in love, I was just sticking around, waiting for it to finally come take over my heart. And I was ashamed of that. I was ashamed of the insincerity that had become natural to my heart.

Let me tell you, without absolute sincerity in love, relationships turn into something pathetic. That is what had become of so many of mine, and that night when I was finally seeing clearly, when I was finally braving the reality of my behavior in love from 18 to 28, I felt so pathetic. So mad at myself. So betrayed by myself.

You see, at 18 I wasn’t gun shy. And that wasn’t because I hadn’t had my heart broken before, it was because I hadn’t broken my own heart yet.

I was naive to all the damage we alone can cause ourselves. That was the beauty of being 18.

I trusted that I would let go before the clock ran over. And I trusted that because I had never gambled with self-betrayal.

When you start breaking up and making up though, when you start handing your heart over and then asking for it back or letting a boyfriend run off with it altogether, you are gambling with betrayal, with smallness, with the trueness of your life. And truth is what makes life real and livable and juicy and glorious. Truth is what people lean in for. It’s what makes a love story so magical.

Ask anyone what would make them happier, living alongside their first love or their true love?

My advice is let your first love be special. It is special. But don’t glorify it. Don’t insist that it’s everything, or that it be everything. Do that and you may miss all the signs that there’s more for you, that somewhere hanging out in your future is a man who doesn’t break up via text or lie about his name or lie about anything at all.

There’s magic in that idea, in the idea that after your first love, there is another. There’s magic in the idea that there may be a man for you that never once betrays your trust. If I were going to hope for anything, I would put some hope behind that.

Listen, you have a lot of questions about your ex and while I realize focusing on him can provide a sense of relief, I don’t want to indulge in it because all that relief will be is temporary. If you want help, his actions are not the ones we need to unpack.

What needs unpacking is your own betrayal. You see, you have to understand that even his betrayal starts with yours. Every betrayal begins inside you. You okay it first.

For example, your ex seeing another girl. That’s only a problem because you want to make it okay to still see him, to go back into town and make up and have sex and mistake sex for loyalty and then go back to school and stretch out your love and believe that the small lies that you saw in the beginning of your relationship will never get so big and out of hand because being with you has made him better than his lies.

Why are you taking that gamble?

Is it really for love, because you love this guy and he’s shown you that he respects himself and you and relationships enough to be dependable, or are you taking this gamble because you know how to take love back but you don’t know how to let love go?

You don’t know what happens after relationships end. You don’t know what happens to those feelings and those memories and that person. You don’t know what happens to you.

At 18, not worrying about the things I didn’t know and how finding out would affect me is what made me so strong. It’s what made my relationships honest and respectable. I wasn’t staying with a man because I knew how I felt with him and was too afraid of what I didn’t know about myself without him. I stayed because staying never felt like the wrong choice. I stayed because staying didn’t interfere with my strength.

If this relationship was right for you, if “winning” your ex back was the only possible choice, then you’d do it. You would know how to do it. You wouldn’t be writing in looking for directions. At least, I don’t think so.

I think you’re writing in because the braver and more honest side of you, as well as the side of you that’s just tired of his unpredictability, wants to know how not to do it. How not to call this relationship right. How not to call your ex the best and obvious choice for you.

I think you’re writing in because the question is, is not winning your ex back the way you win?

My answer is yes.

The way I lost out on true love for so many years of my life is I attached myself to relationships that were already over. That’s why looking back at 28, I found myself admiring who I was at 18. Because at 18, I never would have done this. Ever. And yet a decade later, that’s all I wanted for myself again. I wanted to become the girl I used to be—with that strength, that fearlessness, that self-reliance. I wanted back my boldness in love.

It was clear that leaving at the right time and letting my self-respect direct my heart was the answer to true love. It was the only way into it. And it is, it’s the only way you can honor yourself enough to savor the love you let into your life.

What happened in my twenties was I wound up afraid of what my life would turn into without a relationship. I was afraid of how I would feel once my boyfriend was gone. I was afraid of what would become of me if I was left to sit with myself, if I was all I had.

I was so afraid of that, of experiencing the extent of my own weakness.

But here’s the thing, staying in a relationship that was letting me down didn’t make me stronger. It only made my feelings of weakness stronger.

That’s why I‘m telling you, staying can be a form of self-betrayal. Because staying to avoid feeling weak is how feelings of weakness intensify, which then becomes the reason we latch on tighter to a boyfriend and why that tightness, that latching, ultimately winds up being the very thing which weakens and burns us down to our quick. And without enough courage or desperation, this miserable feedback loop can go on indefinitely.

This is what I’m warning you of.

I’m warning you that staying can turn into weakness and that weakness can become a trap and you might not even see it for what it is until one sleepless night a decade later.

Do yourself a favor, don’t miss out on a decade of true love just because you prioritized your fear by hanging on to your first relationship. Don’t wrap your hands around something you’re no longer meant to hold. Take the cues. Understand that when a man walks away, when he lies or strays or goes missing altogether, that’s the world trying to pull the plug out, that’s the world jumping up and down, shouting for your attention, saying, “On to the next act, sister. We’ve got something else in store and we need to move you along.”

Sometimes you need to just go with it. You’ve got to let up and let life happen for you.

You’ve got to lose the man to gain the love.

If you don’t want to wait until you’re 28 to get love right, that’s my advice.

My advice is you win by losing him.

Love,

Chelsea

PS: Is there any chance for the two of you? Of course. There’s a chance that you’ll go back home and you’ll talk things over, or not, and you’ll have sex and you’ll feel something like passion or connection or maybe you’ll feel desired and that’ll be enough to have you deciding to be together again. It’s happened before so, of course, it is possible for it to happen again. It’s also possible that you’ll receive another breakup text four days later. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”

PPS: Does he miss you? Is that why he texted you? What was the purpose of him reaching out? Yes and yes. He reached out because he missed you. His family reached out because they can tell he misses you and they’re worried about him more than they are about you. My advice is don’t overcomplicate this. In these instances, it’s smart to take things at face value. It will also relax you. One of the best things you can do for yourself is begin cultivating a mind that is free of suspicion, that doesn’t hold every word in doubt. He said he misses you. What’s the harm in believing him? Can’t a man miss you without you falling back into his arms? Let his admissions flatter you. But don’t ever let them build you up. You should be missed. But that doesn’t mean you have to also be his again. It’s not your fault that he’s made a habit out of pulling love in and pushing love out. You won’t fix that for him. You just can’t. My advice is, let him explore what he needs to explore, be it the bodies of other women or the torment that comes with missing out on you. If he misses you, let him.

I am looking for advice on moving on from an ex boyfriend. I know everyone has their crazy stories and thinks they are all terrible and I’m sure you have heard worse, but this ones a real kicker.

We met in college and dated for about a year and a half. When we first started hanging out he told me he had an older brother die in a car accident while he was in high school. He lied. The whole time we dated he let me believe this about him and feel sorry for him. He always added to the story and I always thought something was funny about it but why would someone make up such a horrendous lie? It was a touchy subject so I never brought it up to anyone else. One time when I was visiting his hometown he took me to the “place of the accident”. He proceeded to always add to this lie by telling me stories about him and his “brother” from when they were young.

The whole year and a half he proceeded to put me second all the time to his friends because drinking on the weekends was more important. I am not one to go out drinking like he was. Everyone told me they saw I wasn’t happy but I thought I loved the guy. We would talk about the future and how we wanted the same things in life.

When we broke up he told me he needed time to just figure himself out and be him for awhile; he didn’t want to drag me around while he did that. He wrote me a sappy letter telling me how he will always love me and that he knows he has to do this now so we can have a future together. A month later was when I found out he lied about some other things so I asked about his brother because my curious mind couldn’t find an obituary, news article about the accident, or anything. He said he had no idea why he made up this huge lie. I also found out he told his girlfriend before me the same exact thing.

Well, it has been almost a year now since we broke up. He is dating someone new and I’ve been talking to a new guy but I feel like my past is holding me back from the relationship I deserve with this great guy. At this point I’m not sure what to do anymore. I know my ex boyfriend is a dick and I should stop thinking about him, but it seems like I’m forever hung up on him.

Please any advice can help,

Forever Hung Up

Dear Forever Hung Up,

Your letter is not about your ex being a dick. If he were a dick, you would have stopped thinking about him by now. But you are thinking about him. Almost a year later, and you’re reaching out to me, too. You said you shouldn’t be thinking about him though. Has someone told you that? Often our friends do.

They reiterate that you’ve gone through something lousy and asinine, something unfair and wrong. They call him a liar which makes you suspicious that maybe even his love for you was a lie, that it was obviously a lie. Of course, you were already thinking that but now your friends have just escalated this self-consciousness and now you just feel smaller and even more overlooked by even more people that you’ve let come close to your heart.

My God, you haven’t even experienced real love! You know nothing! Has the enemy within you told you this before? I bet. I bet you feel cheated out of your own romance, your own feelings, the deep and sacred emotions of your life. You fear for yourself, for the foolish side of you that falls for these dicks, these sociopaths, these spineless liars so unlike yourself but who are very much your ex, and then you fear for the courageous side of you, too. The compassionate side. The side of you that falls in love with stories, even though those stories are lies, the side of you that falls in love with wounds, even though the wounded has created those wounds to cover up the ones that not even he has the heart, let alone the courage and compassion, to get close enough to to understand, to make peace with and resolve.

But that’s because of his own intimidation, and his intimidation should not create in you a fear that did not exist before. Actually, should is the wrong word. You’ve already told me you should stop thinking about him. And, in my opinion, that’s already one should too many. So, I’ll take my should back and I’d like to challenge you to do the same for yourself. Give yourself permission to think about your ex, be it a long time or a short time, think about your relationship with him for however long it takes to think deeply enough. Because, here’s the thing, whether his intimidation should or should not create a fear in you matters little. It matters little when the reality is his intimidation, the wounds he has and the lies he’s used to guard himself against his own hauntedness, can create fear and insecurity and suspicion in you, and the point of you reaching out to me and my reaching back to you is the same: we must relieve you of this transgression. More than greater love with this new man of yours, you deserve to have a spirit unencumbered by lies and shoulds and the shameless deceit inflicted by a single man. Or, in this case, a sad sack.

So, let’s start there. Your ex is not a dick. Dicks can be forgotten. Your ex has been someone you’ve had to endure. He’s a sad sack, an inept person who causes feelings of pity or disgust in other people. You are disgusted that you have looked dreamingly into the eyes of a man who has taken you to the faux death site of his faux brother. That’s disturbing as much as it is disgusting. To be sure, your relationship started with—and quite possibly, in his mind, was sustained by—pity for him. Pity that his brother died. Pity that his brother was plucked tragically from this earth. Pity that, now brotherless, he feels more alone in this world. Pity that he’s a man who could be haunted by events and the emotions attached to them, a man who’s grieving and therein should be given both the support and space from you, his faithfully understanding and patient girlfriend, whenever he should need it, whenever he should call upon you to adore him or push you aside so he can chug beer and forget his pain like any grieving young adult would want to.

I realize the seesaw of emotions this would have created in you. As a young woman, it’s difficult enough to know your place in the world. Add to that knowing your place in your boyfriend’s life—a boyfriend who is, supposedly, surviving the devastating loss of his own blood. How much love can you insist upon? How much closeness makes sense with someone whose impulse will be to cling in one moment and fear you in the next? If I were you, I very likely would have manically reasoned away his “putting me second all the time” by telling myself that, of course he is! He’s grieving! Of course he needs me and then wants nothing to do with me! Of course, of course, of course! Because that’s how humans behave when they’ve lost anyone for the first time. They sabotage anything that comes along and looks like love, that comes along and feels like home.

Maybe you looked a little bit like love. Maybe you felt a little bit like home. You must have because for a year and a half he not only kept up a lie, but added to it. And that’s why love is so bittersweet. We feel at home when we are with it. We get comfortable and a new normal becomes us.

You see, the best of us will relax into this comfort, put down our shields and weaponry, and will discover ourselves with the person who has aided us in accessing this newfound freedom. But the worst of us will not do this. The worst of us will get comfortable being the worst part of ourselves. We will feel so comfortable lying that we will eventually forget our own truth, and we will forget why it is so needed. We will forget where the lie ends and we start. And so, out of our own forgetfulness, the lies won’t stop and we won’t ever really start. The deceit will only compound. Because what’s comfortable, inevitably, becomes second nature. At least, we want it to. That’s why your ex has carried his lies into all of his romances. Because he wants to exist in what he already knows he can control.

He uses faux pity to control how fast and in what nature his relationships evolve. He uses faux pity to also direct the attention toward him in some cases and off of him in others. He is in lust with convenience. How sad. How chaotic. How unsustainable. Genuine attention has probably never, ever come easily or naturally for your ex. Which speaks to why anyone would ever possibly want to grow comfortable in their own deceit, comfortable in making honest love impossible. Because deceit relaxes them from having to learn and then admit to who they really are which often feels like the admission of everything they are not. This is what your ex is up against. He’s up against all he has never exposed, which is most of him. He’s up against a world he has never lived honestly in. It’s a good thing you aren’t sharing in his world any longer.

I want you to see your ex for who he is because that insight will facilitate your distancing yourself from him in your mind. It’s how you will separate the love you are able to give from the love you have only received. If you see yourself as an innocent participant in this story of yours, if you see yourself as a woman who was only wanting to love, who was only trying to make life easier for a man who had already experienced so much pain, then you will be able to move forward acknowledging that you are a valuable, gifted woman. Men will yearn for your substance. Women will admire your abundance. You will help people come into love. That is, if you remain willing to give it, to open up and invest your heart again. Not just in boyfriends but in people.

Right now you are a woman moving through the world naive to all the love, all the potential for connection, that’s being carried within her. This is the perfect moment in your life to finally begin acknowledging yourself, to finally begin thinking, not of your ex and his capacity to lie, but of you and your capacity to love with truth. Tell me, how will you compliment yourself today? Tell me, what impresses you about yourself? Think of it. Write it down. Say it aloud. However you do it, just make sure you begin to. Make sure you begin to thank yourself. Make sure to treat yourself good.

Because you may have been with your ex, but you are not him. You do not do what he does. Celebrate that. Celebrate. And whenever you are hurting, remind yourself of the difference between the best of us who relax into love and the worst of us who relax into self-hatred. Acknowledging the camp you’re in is a reliable way to cheer yourself on and cheer yourself up.

We have to acknowledge what this is all really about though, to acknowledge why this drama has been imposed upon your current relationship and is limiting it, too. The reason is, what you’re hung up on is not what you think you are hung up on. What’s holding you back is not who your ex is or what your ex did. It’s not the memories of him, the memories of his faux pity or even your genuine love. What’s holding you back is all that’s gone unacknowledged. Unrealized. What you’re hung up on is not who he turned out to be but who you’ve turned out to be because of this experience, because this is now apart of your psyche, apart of your reality, your radar, story, and life.

Most people in your situation would think they were coping with the loss of a boyfriend, of a breakup. And in small ways, they are. They’ve lost a friend, a confidant. They’ve lost that future that you wrote me about. The talks about wanting the same things in life. You’ve lost the vision of where your life was headed. You’ve lost that and you’ve lost the idea of who you thought your ex was and who you imagined he could be once he had healed from the tragic lie he held over you and convinced you of. Those details are the smallest details, and they are the ones you are focusing on, the ones you are making into everything and fighting the acceptance of. This is why you haven’t healed yet, this is why you are still held back by a boyfriend you seem “forever hung up on”. Because you are not standing up to the biggest loss of all. You are not grieving the reality that haunts you most.

This is your reality: You’ve lost your innocence. That’s what lies strip us of. That’s what boyfriends who lie strip us of. They strip us of our own beautiful naivety. Our own beautiful fantasy. The fantasy that no one is out to fool us. The fantasy that no one can fool us, either. Lies change us in this way. They shatter and transform us. They take believers and turn them into skeptics. They turn trusting people into distrusting people. Paranoid people. People that erect walls and barricades around their heart and go on to never let love in without resistance. Good people give up on people like that. It’s too much work, too much drama, too much distress and self-doubt. That’s what disbelief really is. Disbelief is suspicion and suspicion turns into self-doubt. Good hearted people like you want to be surrounded by those who don’t doubt—don’t doubt others or themselves. Good hearted people like you want to find those who are accepting. Think about it, if your ex were actually accepting of himself, these lies would never have been fed to you in the first place. By the way, I’m sorry that they were.

But it’s not the end of the world. It’s only the end of love as you know it. That’s another reason to celebrate. If you lean in wisely, love will only go up from here. You have choices right now. You can begin having the conversation that your friends have probably helped you shut down. A conversation no longer about your ex being a liar and a dick or how untrustworthy men can be and how doomed you are, but a conversation that gets to the heart of the matter, that reveals what this breakup has provoked in you, what this deceit has stripped you of, what questions this relationship has made you vulnerable to. Like, are you afraid you are a woman who is easy to fool? Angry that you are a woman who now doubts every story she hears? Who plays CIA agent and manically fact checks a person’s life? Have you lost faith in yourself? In your capacity to hunt down the gems of the world? Are you disappointed in your own willingness to overlook those “funny” feelings early on, those gut stirrings that say step away from this red flag of a person right now?

I have promising news. Don’t be so afraid. This is one relationship. This is one liar. You will meet others and you will not meet them, too. You will learn to trust yourself early on and to forgive yourself for falling into relationships that then complicate the romances which come after them. Don’t be mean to yourself about this, about the tangles your mind gets tied up in, about the people whose behavior trips you up and, in most instances, was and always will be beyond your control. You are learning. You are discovering. You are doing what we all are doing as we find our way into greater love. You are getting overwhelmed by those who fall in and out of your life, by the relationships which shake you and your understanding of love at the very core. In truth, it’s better than not being shaken at all. Again, this is your time to be growing through love. To let love in, you’ll have to accept that you’ll be plunging toward growth.

I’m going to tell you something, something that will keep you open and keep you trusting and keep you from becoming the bitter, broken, cynic of a woman that you do not want to become just because this experience with your ex. For my message to work though, you’ve got to believe in it. You’ve got to practice it. Here it goes. Men are not the problem. Certain people become our problems.You have your entire life in front of you, don’t let suspicion ruin the romance of it.

When you think of your ex, it’s okay to think of him as a liar. As a sad sack. But make sure that instead of only reminding yourself of him, of that, you remind yourself of what you felt at times with him. Remind yourself of the moments where your trust was powerful, where your heart was compassionate, where you felt that maybe you were being tricked but you chose to risk yourself, where you chose to give someone a chance. More than being fooled, you have been brave.And that’s all been you. Liars cannot strip you of that. They may shake you up but you’ve got bravery in you. You’ve got trust and intuition. And you will be brave and you will be trusting again. You will trust in men and you will also trust yourself, that you have the instinct to know who is relaxing into their best selves and who is too comfortable living through their worst.

You do know what to do. You just have to let this fallout change your life. You have to let this deception inspire you to never be the deceiver and to never engage love in a way that is half alive. You have to put aside the bad guys and love with all the goodness you have inside of you. You know how to do that. Go do it. Then, do it again and again and always one more time.

Isn’t it refreshing? One, single column of beautiful content surrounded by airy whitespace. The demise of the sidebar has resulted in some great new design possibilities and we’re jumping in feet first. Starting with this purposely minimalist blog design. We’re not lazy, we swear, we just love big, huge photos smack in the middle of a white page. Don’t you? Especially when it’s your lovely work and thoughtfully crafted words locking eyes with readers.

Now, we’re not bloggers (not lately anyway), so we won’t go on and on about our love for a great single column blog. Instead we’ll simply add in some dummy text to help you visualize and move on to the next item on our to-do list. How about another photo for good measure as well?

Sometimes you just want to mix it up, and now with our optional sidebar layout you can do just that. Choose to add a sidebar to the entire blog, or just to specific posts – the choice is really up to you! A fully widgetized sidebar is the perfect place for a signup form, some social media links, archives, search bar and more. Choice is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?

Sometimes you just want to mix it up, and now with our optional sidebar layout you can do just that. Choose to add a sidebar to the entire blog, or just to specific posts – the choice is really up to you! A fully widgetized sidebar is the perfect place for a signup form, some social media links, archives, search bar and more. Choice is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?

If you read our other post about how much we like single column blogs, then you’ll also know that we like great full width photos that demand your attention. So here are some more to really get our point across. It’s kind of like a gallery; calming, inspiring and a tad intimidating (in a good way) all at the same time.

If you read our other post about how much we like single column blogs, then you’ll also know that we like great full width photos that demand your attention. So here are some more to really get our point across. It’s kind of like a gallery; calming, inspiring and a tad intimidating (in a good way) all at the same time.

About Us

We're Mike and Brittni, a husband and wife creative team with a soft spot for minimalism and clean typography. Our themes are built with the latest web design trends and functionality in mind and are quality coded to provide you with a solid platform to show off what you do best.